PRAISE FOR ARIEL'S CROSSING
“Morrow uses a woman’s search to find her father as a vehicle to explore the dual legacies of Los Alamos and Vietnam in his latest, a powerful, multilayered novel. This is another outstanding, thought-provoking novel from one of America’s major literary voices as he continues to explore the issues that made Trinity Fields so compelling and memorable.”
—Publishers Weekly
“In Ariel’s Crossing, Morrow has written a ghost story of sorts, in which he explores all those notions of who is the ghost and who is the haunted... the author argues for the gravity of home: Neither the living nor the dead can escape its draw...Ariel’s Crossing convincingly argues that it is not ghosts but what we repeat that haunts and sometimes comforts us.”
—The Washington Post
“Morrow has shaped his fifth novel with richly crafted prose and a wealth of meaning. He has a superb sense of place, and has written a novel with universal themes of home and family, of love and regret, of seeking and accepting all, all of which play out against the beautifully rendered splendor of New Mexico.”
—Rocky Mountain News
“In this richly layered novel about searching for family and reconciliation, author Bradford Morrow peels back the geography of New Mexico to reveal its unforgiving core of rock and scree. The Land of Enchantment is also a landscape haunted by a nuclear testing legacy during the 1950...in Morrow’s masterful, poignant novel, the term ‘nuclear family’ has more than one meaning.”
—Boston Herald
“With its extraordinary mix of the natural and the supernatural, its lyricism and its rich humanity, its great themes of self and family and the community, Ariel’s Crossing is reminiscent of and fully equal to the nest of Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Bradford Morrow is one of our most important writers, and this is one of his most brilliant books.”
—Robert Olen Butler
“Set in New Mexico, a landscape Bradford Morrow knows intimately, Ariel’s Crossing is an ambitious, rich, and original story of loss, rapture, the end and the beginning of things.”
—Joyce Carol Oates
“A novel of simmering conscience and planet-fervor, its afterburners going all through and lofting it to almost visionary status. It is brave, magisterial, deceptively perceptive and even more lyrical, more penetrating, than it seems, which I find a mark of Art.”
—Paul West
“A story as transfixing as any ghost... the novel begins with an enchanting dose of magical realism, set in the nineteenth century, and what may be the year’s best opening paragraph... Morrow’s verbal gymnastics frequently are dazzling.”
—Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
“Morrow picks up the story he launched in Trinity Fields about two Los Alamos boys troubled by their father’s work on the atom bomb.... Evincing an unshakeable belief in humanity and life and a love for New Mexico’s glorious landscape, he dissects the bonds of family and land, ponders questions of integrity and faith, and assesses the toll the nuclear menace exacts from our collective soul.”
—Booklist
“I loved Ariel’s Crossing. The ghost is amazing, so, too, the physical, cultural, and emotional landscape. It is powerfully moving and panoramic.”
—Diane Ackerman